Case Study: We Sold Mufflers on Facebook for $8/day

It was a hot muggy day in the middle of the summer here in South Florida. The slow time of the year. All of the “snowbirds” were back “up north” either in their summer homes on Long Island or possibly somewhere in Quebec.

During this time of year, as much as 75% of the local population simply disappears and will migrate to one region or another. This takes a huge toll on a lot of local businesses and is usually a “make it or break it time” for a lot of those small businesses. This time of year you can normally find great deals on pretty much anything you are looking for, from cars to an HVAC contract.

One day one of our friends gave us a ring who we’ve worked with in the past. They own a muffler shop here in South Florida and they, like many other businesses needed to make their phone ring.

A gang of us gathered in our company Skype group aka “#ballsohard” to discuss a buzz strategy.

Strategy: Who is Our Customer?

We started asking questions:

what type of people buy mufflers?

what time of day do people make the decision to buy mufflers?

do people shop around to buy mufflers?

are their different types of muffler customers?

are people willing to drive more than 5 miles for a deal on mufflers?

This is one of the most important parts of figuring out a PPC campaign. During the strategy phase, you determine the overall demographics of your Facebook bid targeting.

Develop a Customer Profile

Once we had answers to our questions, we were able to develop a customer profile (all of which we were able to do in under 20 minutes)

Customer #1 (campaign 1):

is male or female

age 25-60

is purchasing a replacement muffler

would most likely not drive more than 10 miles of zip code 33313

might shop around

will most likely call, not email for a quote

Customer #2 (campaign 2)

is male

age 17-27

is purchasing a muffler for aesthetic reasons

would most likely not drive more than 20 miles of zip code 33313

might shop around

will most likely call, not email for a quote

Craft a Quick Landing Page

We wanted to make a landing page that made our visitor feel as though this landing page was specific just to them. Most importantly we wanted to make sure that the landing page matched the ad creative. There is no better way to scare off a customer than to create an inconsistent environment.

We crafted a quick landing page that looked something like this:

Our landing page was quick, swift, and to the point.

Let’s Make Some Ads

Over the past year, the Facebook advertising interface has gotten crazy with updates! We wanted to keep it super simple: pick some demographic information, write some creative text, and make some ads.

We created 2 campaigns with 10 ads each. Each ad varied having different creative text, headline, image, and slightly different demographic information.

2 Example Ads

Our first example ad (customer 1, campaign 1) targeted about 8,200 people. Relatively small but for small business advertising that is exactly what you want to try and do. By getting as specific as possible with location and demographic information, you increase your odds of conversions.

Our second example ad (customer 2, campaign 2) targeted about 130,000 people. Much higher and riskier than the other one but we figured we may as well give it a shot.

After playing around with some really creative headlines and some cool images, we launched our campaigns.

We set our campaigns to run for the next 6 days (Monday – Saturday) from 9am-6pm. Since this was just a friendly campaign, we set our budget at $8 per day to start. We figured with clicks as low as $.10-20 we would hopefully get a few dozen clicks every day.

The Shocking Results

Ok they aren’t really shocking. Since we didn’t set up any call tracking, phone calls would be routed right to the mechanics office. For the next few days we simply “set it and forget it.” We disabled a few ads that weren’t getting any impressions and ramped up the ones that got a great CTR.

Ramping up ads that get a high CTR is a tried and true method of getting lower CPC (cost per click). Since our account also had a lot of history this made it a lot easier.

Within a few days, we were able to make his phone ring several times and sell several mufflers.

Mission accomplished!

Postmortem

In total we spent probably only about an hour on this campaign total from setup to launch. Setting up small business advertising on Facebook has never been easier for the savvy small business owner. But beware, there are a number of options not mentioned here that could easily confuse someone trying this for the first time.

As mentioned, Facebook’s advertising interface can be very intimidating if you do not know what you are doing.

If you have any questions about Facebook advertising or anything related, don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions!

Patrick Coombe is the founder and CEO of Elite Strategies Llc. Patrick takes a hands on approach to managing Elite Strategies and loves to get involved with technical projects relating to clients inbound marketing needs.